Abstract [en]

This doctoral project was inspired by a set of challenges articulated in the cultural praxis of athletes’ careers paradigm (Stambulova & Ryba, 2013), and especially in regard of contextualizing career research and existing ‘general’ frameworks. Innovative aspects of this study consisted of: (a) exploring career experiences of Swedish handball players with foci on stages and transitions in their athletic and non-athletic development, and (b) consolidating the players’ first-hand data into an empirical career model of Swedish handball players (further – the empirical model). The holistic athletic career model (Wylleman, Reints & De Knop, 2013) served as a prototype for the empirical model and was useful in structuring the players’ career experiences. Eighteen elite Swedish handball players (retiring or just recently retired) took part in narrative type interviews about their whole careers with an interest in both athletic and non-athletic developments. Thematic analysis initially took a deductive turn to identify the handball career structure, and then the empirical data relevant to each stage/sub-stage were analysed inductively to identify themes describing players’ career experiences at each stage. Finally, the themes were incorporated into the stage-like structure, and the empirical model was completed. The model describes careers of Swedish handball players as having four stages – initiation, development (with three sub-stages), mastery (with four sub-stages), and discontinuation. It also contains eight layers – athletic categorisation in terms of age, pathways of the Swedish Handball Federation, academic/vocational, psychological, psychosocial, and financial developments – all aligned with age markers and complemented by sets of themes describing players’ stage-by-stage career experiences from the holistic perspective. Further in the project the empirical model will be used to create the ‘whole career’ psychological support system for Swedish handball players.